like thread through a needle
by androidilenya
Summary: Míriel weaves, and watches over the ones she loves from the halls of Vairë. (Vaguely a sequel to 'For My Only Love'; pre-femslash.)


_Your absence has gone through me  
Like thread through a needle.  
Everything I do is stitched with its color. _  
~W. S. Merwin

.*.

_Míriel._

(no, I want to rest, leave me _alone––_)

_Míriel, wake!_

Her eyes flicked open, light flooding in, and she squeezed them shut immediately. This––this was wrong. She wanted to rest, that was all, wanted to sleep in darkness for as long as she wished (_forever_, something whispered, and so much of her wanted to listen to that, stay perfectly still and fade into the sounds of the world, the borders between her skin and the whirling darkness erased).

_Wake,_ the voice said again, more gently, and she felt warm hands beneath her, lifting her up.

She felt her lips part against her will, cool fingers prying them open and pouring something cold and sweet down her throat. That voice––that voice was almost familiar––

_Vairë?_

_Yes, Míriel, it is I._ The Valië sounded amused. The hands––they must have been hers––pulled away. Míriel tried opening her eyes again, had a little more success this time; the light was not nearly as blinding. She was in a room of all white, curtains billowing in an unseen wind around windows that looked out on darkness. The bed beneath her was wide, dwarfing both her slight frame and Vairë kneeling on the blankets beside her.

_Then I am––no longer in Aman? _She took a deep breath of air scented with lilac and lilies and something heady and sweet she could not identify, then added, _Good. I was... tired._

_I know._

Some of the strength was flowing back into her limbs. She sat up, pushing the soft woolen blanket aside, suddenly yearning to stand at the window and look out at that blackness (would she see something familiar there, she wondered, or only more of the darkness that already lurked inside of her?). Vairë's hand closed around her wrist, cool and insistent, and she froze.

_Stay awhile longer, Míriel. Or did you not come here because you wished to rest?_

She swallowed, the movement slow and somehow foreign, as if her body were trying to relearn something it had once been able to do. "I wish to stand, now," she said, speaking aloud for the first time since waking, and if her voice was rough with disuse it was pleasant to _hear_ something besides the crushing silence. "I am, perhaps, not so exhausted as you may think."

She half wanted Vairë to be angry at her for that, but instead a slow smile crossed the Valië's face. _Very well, Míriel._

"And speak out _loud_, won't you?" She swung her legs over the side of the bed, clenching her jaw as the cold air hit her––she wanted to shiver. The floor was perfectly smooth against her bare feet. She could feel Vairë's eyes on her as she crossed to the window, caught one of the fluttering curtains in her fist, and leaned out the window.

Nothing. Blank, smooth darkness, a wall of nothing an inch from her face. She wasn't quite sure what she had expected, to tell the truth.

"I thought the Halls looked out on the Encircling Sea," she said, turning back to Vairë.

_This–– _Vairë stopped and amended her statement, swallowing once before opening her mouth. "This is my little corner of the Halls, Míriel, and the world outside is as I see it." Her voice wasn't quite what Míriel had expected after hearing it in her mind; aloud, it had a deeper quality to it, and more of a musical lilt.

"Black and featureless? That is your world?" She crossed her arm, gave Vairë a look that would have sent Finwë apologizing. "Then all your tapestries are the same, I suppose––black thread shrouding the walls with _your world_."

Vairë stood carefully, feet whisper-soft on the cold floor. She extended one hand to Míriel, dark eyes glinting strangely. "Come and see."

* * *

Valinor was wide, and all the wider and lonelier when the one you loved was gone forever.

They had brought the news to Indis in the darkness, the wide-eyed sons of her husband's firstborn, and spoken the words aloud to the terrified people that sealed Finwë's death (as though letting the words be spoken cemented his death in reality, tore him from her more finally than Moringotto's blow had done––and perhaps it had, for all that).

_Blood and darkness––and death, Finwë, even you could not have predicted that when you left with that son of yours._

She had not grieved before the people. Would not. That was for herself, alone in her rooms; only there could she let out the rage and heart-tearing grief loose, the festering hurt within bubbling free and exploding from her lips in a cry of pain and fury and _denial_ (because death was not something they had said was possible, and death was something that hung over this family like a grey mist, Míriel and Finwë and all the rest who had left). The world blotted out in red, and her skin bleeding where she had scratched herself in her blind hurt, the curtains torn down and the bedspread ripped, her dress tattered––that was for her, only for her, and to let the world see that pain was to cheapen it, make it something that no longer belonged to her.

She owed Finwë that much, at least, to give him what she held inside.

And so Indis was able to stand before her people and tell them where to go, what to do; able to sit in the great golden throne that had been the King's––though it had not been for some time, now, but had still sat empty until it was known that its former occupant no longer had a body to sit in it.

The first time they called her Queen, something in her shifted. It sounded so perfectly correct, so inevitable, and she felt the smallest change in the motion of the world about her.

_Queen Indis, then. That is a role I may take._

* * *

She wandered the halls for a long time––but time didn't seem to matter here, so it might have been a day and it might have been a century; truthfully, she couldn't bring herself to care much either way.

She counted time in breath and heartbeat, and the sounds her body made were the only ones in those death-still halls. (The fact that she _had_ a body to make sounds at all was a surprise, and she couldn't quite remember how it ought to have been, otherwise.) There was time enough for her to decide that she would not think of time here as _days_, but as _nights_––for what was there outside her window and every window but eternal night as far as the eye could see?

The halls seemed to change under her very feet. Every now and then, she would happen across something new, something unexpected, though she considered herself and this place beyond surprise.

The open room at the end of one of the endless, twisting hallways remained a mystery.

She was drawn there by the light; an odd light that seemed neither gold nor silver, with no visible source. There was something else, too: a low musical hum that thrummed through her bones, growing with every step she took towards the light, and the noise was strange and frightening after so long in the silence.

"Vairë?" she asked, knowing the Valië would not answer. After Míriel had left the room she had slept in for so long, Vairë had simply _vanished_, leaving her to walk this place alone. She hadn't minded, but this was new.

She stole forward, then stopped with her hand on the edge of the doorway, the smooth wood cool under her palm. The door was open just a crack, light spilling down the dim hallway.

There was nothing here that could hurt her.

She was only half startled when she pushed the door open and saw a flicker of movement from the figure sitting there. Vairë glanced up at her, the loom in front of her pausing in its smooth, silent motion for a moment before resuming, thread flickering through her fingers in bursts of brilliant color.

"So _you_ were in here."

Vairë nodded. "I have always been in here, Míriel."

"Right." She took another step in. The hum that had pervaded the air outside had faded; this room was very nearly silent. Even the loom was unnaturally quiet in its every movement. She supposed that had to be one of Vairë's little tricks. "So why didn't you answer?"

"I would not be the one to invite you into this room," Vairë replied. Míriel waited for her to that particular mysterious statement, and when she simply continued to weave in silence, Míriel frowned.

"Then who would you rather had invited me in here?"

"Yourself," Vairë replied. Her hands fell still. Míriel hesitated, then crossed to stand beside her.

"What do you weave, Vairë?" There was barely three inches of woven tapestry at the top, and the hanks of thread that hung down from under her hands were silver and green, blue and tan.

Vairë stood, offering Míriel the seat. "Whatever I see. Is it not always so?" She smiled then, soft and kind. "You have been taskless for a long time, Míriel. Would you like to spend some time at this work?"

She only hesitated for a heartbeat before lowering herself onto the stool, letting her fingers run over the silken threads. How long had it been since she had woven? Before she came here, certainly, and the last complete weaving had to have been before the birth of her son––

_Fëanáro. My son. _

She could see him again.

Her hands were moving before she had even told them to, threads pulled taut under her fingers. If there had been any question as to whether or not she remembered how to do this, that worry dissipated as soon as the silk began running through her fingers. There was no possibility that she could have _forgotten_, not this.

"I want to start from the beginning," she told Vairë distantly, and felt rather than saw the Valië's smile.

"Which beginning?" Vairë asked, and Míriel's lips curved in a small smile for the first time in a long time.

"Any of them."

* * *

"Milady?"

Indis glanced up, and something about the look on the messenger's face made her frown. "What is it, Alassië?"

"There is someone here to see you." The girl looked far too nervous for it to be a regular state visit, too composed for it to be an attack of any sort (and attacks were something everyone was always so _concerned_ about, despite the fact that the only attack on this sheltered land had been Moringotto's, and none of the Eldar had been in the way of that one––save one).

"It's your son."

Her first, panicked (ridiculous) thought was _Fëanáro?_ even though he was not (had never been) hers. They had called him hers, over and over, and he had always gotten so furious over such a simple word––not simple, of course for one who had lost his mother in the land where none died.

"Which one?" she asked through numb lips, rising from her chair and setting aside the embroidered cloak she had been working on. Not Nolofinwë, surely, he would not have left his half-brother so soon––

"Arafinwë," Alassië replied, confirming Indis' suspicion, and she swept out the door before Alassië could say anything more, something akin to panic rising in her throat, something like nervousness knotting her hands around the thin fabric of her dress.

She hurried down the stairs and across the hall, to where the cool night air blew in from outside. Her son stood in the doorway still, hand on the sill as though afraid to take another step in, and there were hollows in his cheeks that had not been there before, a haunted light in his eyes. She did not hesitate, merely swept straight through his hesitant smile and flung her arms around him, squeezing tight and smiling into his silken hair.

"You returned."

He lifted his head, looking more like a lost little boy than anything else in that moment. "Ammë, I'm so sorry for leaving––"

She shook her head, smile widening. "You have come back, and that is all that matters."

* * *

The first tapestry was blood on the water and bright swords shining in the hands of her son's sons, the grandchildren she had never seen. The individual threads had a way of enthralling her, demanding every bit of her attention, so it was not until she looked up and saw a snarling face that she knew to be her son's (and how he had changed, from the small child she had left behind) it startled her enough that she nearly fell backwards off her chair.

"What happened?" she asked Vairë when she appeared to collect the tapestry, and Vairë's only response was to hand her hanks of flame-orange and gold and black thread with a small, unreadable frown.

Míriel could go further back, she discovered, weave whatever she wished into the threads before her. The utter truth of the colors that she spun was never something she doubted, and so she took delight in tracing the works of her son, following him from a lost child to a master craftsman, through the courting of his wife and the birth of his sons––

And she followed him down every step of the way into the darkness, weaving a sword pressed to a half-brother's throat with all the care she had given to Fëanáro holding his firstborn child.

The next time she saw Vairë, the question she asked was, "Is this my fault?" It seemed that way when she looked up to see a ghost in the grey, hate-filled eyes she had woven over bloodied water.

Vairë shook her head. "None can be blamed for their own deeds but themselves, in the end. Surely you know that by now, Míriel."

She did not argue with that, though not because she agreed. It was simpler to pretend that she believed such simple things, that the world was not more akin to a tangled knot of threads than it was to a neatly woven tapestry.

There was more, of course, once she had exhausted the childhood she had missed spending with her son: her husband's son in a wasteland of white, her own son outlined against black smoke and orange flame eating away at stolen ships. And she did not spare herself the slightest detail of Fëanáro's death in his son's arms, though there were tears falling fast and thick by the time she was done, blurring the red and black and her child's dying face.

_Did it have to be this way?_

Never once did she considered halting in this telling of the tale of her kin. Not until there was nothing left to tell.

* * *

Indis offered the kingship to her son, knowing that it was what Finwë would have wanted, and was only slightly surprised when Arafinwë laughed and shook his head.

"Maybe after some time, Ammë. I don't think the throne is a very good place for me right now, nor I a good ruler to sit in it."

They sat on the porch of the house in which he now lived, on a high cliff overlooking the starlit sea. Arafinwë looked more at peace here than anywhere else, and Indis found that she understood that. There was little peace in the city where her husband had once ruled, not when Finwë's face stared back at her from every doorway, not when his laugh echoed down every empty corridor. (The throne––the throne had always been too large.)

She made a noise of reluctant agreement. "If ever you wish to return to Tirion, know that there will be a place at my side for my son."

Arafinwë turned fully towards her, concern clear in the eyes that were near-perfect copies of hers. "And how do the people react to these changing times?"

"There was some––a _great deal _of unrest in the days immediately following the Darkening," she replied carefully, and when Arafinwë gave no sign she continued. "The people were lost, seeking a leader, and I––was the only who who stepped in to fill the throne. Things have calmed down, since then––there are few things one cannot get used to, eventually. Nerdanel has been a great help to me, though she tends more towards the practical side of rebuilding. The city requires a great deal of maintenance, now, with most of the dwellings empty and uncared for, but she has matters well in hand––"

"And you, Ammë?" he interrupted, voice soft, and she felt the words die in her throat. "How have you been?"

"I––am well." He had to have heard the hesitation in her voice, but she would not burden him further. It was normal, after all, for some to hold grudges (immortality granted the ability to hold a grudge for as long as you pleased, after all, for there was no worry that death would tear the other away before a reconciliation could be made––not, presumably, among those who stayed). Some had never forgiven the second wife of Finwë for sowing the seeds of discontent.

Her son always knew her mind well, so she was not surprised when he sighed and said, "There are some who still blame you, is that it?"

"Perhaps," she replied, as lightly as she could. "But there have always been those who thought that Fëanáro's later troubles might have been averted had I never existed, had I been a better step-mother... a host of things, truthfully." If she had not doomed Finwë's first wife by accepting his hand––but that was long ago, and even if she wished to undo it––which she would not say she never had––it was far too late for such thoughts.

"It was not your fault."

Indis raised an eyebrow, regarding Arafinwë with soft reproach, as though there were not something in her that cried out against that. "I never said it was."

And, of course: _It was all my fault, surely you _know_ that by now._

* * *

Míriel wove a red-haired king hanging from a black mountain, and a song that rescued him, and after that there was peace of a sort (though the crown rested on another head, now). The tapestries offered her a new thing, now, more immediate: the land she left, the land her son left. A golden queen, head unbowed with grief despite the pain in her star-bright eyes.

She wove the new land under Indis' rule, the slow emergence of normalcy from the chaos wreaked by the destruction of the Trees. She wove Indis, on her throne, meting out justice, and she wove Indis alone in her chambers, head bowed with tired sadness. She thought about loss, and the chain of death that linked them––Míriel's own, and Finwë's––and felt something almost like kinship with the golden queen.

She supposed that there should have been something strange about that sentiment, but couldn't figure out why she would feel otherwise. Indis was stronger than she was, after all––she had stayed, and rebuilt their shattered world, and now there was no one to comfort her as she mourned.

Indis would not accept comfort. Míriel had seen that much in the tapestries that poured from her fingers. But sometimes, spinning golden hair from thread, she could almost _feel_ Indis' presence, mere inches from her fingertips. And in those moments, she would press her hand to the soft cloth and close her eyes, willing some measure of _something_ to pass through, something that she hoped was enough to make Indis smile for a time.

She watched over Indis, wove tapestry after tapestry of her face, her deeds (however small), her grief. In doing so, she learned of Indis' small habits, her friends, her love for her son.

It took her until the seventh such tapestry, Indis brushing a strand of hair from a young Arafinwë's face in an earlier time, to realize that what she felt on seeing Indis' face was _friendship_.

She sat back from the half-woven tapestry and ran her fingers over Indis' pale hand, smiling. "You and I, we might have been friends, once," she said, as if the tapestry could answer her. "Is that not a fine jest, now that I cannot leave this place?"

_I will comfort you as I can from here, Indis; serve the part of a friend as best I can. Perhaps in a better time, we would have had a chance to truly be such._

* * *

The moon rose five years to the day after Finwë's death, and Indis stood at the window wondering if they had planned it that way, as––as what? A monument to what had been lost that day, perhaps, or another reminder that the old ways would never return.

Isil cast a silver light that reminded her of the way Telperion would shine through the sheer curtains in her and Finwë's bedroom, casting their luminous shadows across the bare floor. For a moment, the image it conjured was almost too much: Finwë, on their wedding day, laying her down in the bed and pressing his lips to hers, murmuring about _forever_ in a voice that promised just that.

She felt the sudden sting in her eyes and didn't bother to blink away the tears that came, spilling over her cheeks. It felt like a release, after so long.

_Finwë-_

Her hands clenched around the windowsill, nails digging into the splintering wood. She closed her eyes, sucking in a breath that was more than half a sob, and could have sworn she felt the moonlight battering at her face, seeping into her very skin.

A breath of cool wind across her bare arms, like protecting arms encircling her. Her eyes flew open and the room was empty––but the touch remained.

_It is no terrible thing to grieve, Indis, _the wind whispered.

"I'm so afraid," she found herself telling the silver moonlight. "This world––I don't know what I'm doing in it, I've _never––_"

_No one ever does. And you have put this world back together rather well, don't you think?_ The voice––if it even was that, if it was more than a product of her imagination––sounded familiar.

She swallowed, tongue darting out to wet her suddenly dry lips. "I'm so alone," she whispered, realizing the truth of those words for the first time.

_No more, Indis._ The arms that were not there tightened around her and she closed her eyes, imagined that someone _was_ there, holding her through the night.

* * *

Míriel had thought she had seen all the ruined world had to offer when she wove her son's death, ashes on a dark wind. She had thought the onslaught of Moringotto's fire, consuming the princes of her house, and the chaos that followed had been the worst that could happen.

And then her grandsons fell, three of the seven, and the rest were left to build funeral pyres in a strange forest under looming trees.

_This should not have happened._

The tears were falling before she realized it, spots of darker color on the woven tapestry. _I cannot do this, I cannot bear such cruelty every day of eternity––won't this ever _end_?_

Her hands moved with sudden, vicious speed, reaching up to rend the cloth in two. Perhaps some terrified, irrational part of her thought that if she destroyed the evidence, the crime would have never been committed. (If the teller of the tale changed the tale, she thought frantically, would history have changed as well?)

The instant the cloth began to tear there was a sudden bolt of pain in her head, like a flash of lightning. She fell back, panting, colors fluttering at the edge of her vision, her hands throbbing as though she had pressed them to hot metal. The woven scene leered down at her, crimson blood on her grandson's faces. The branches under them were catching fire, smoke and flame devouring their bodies, laid down as though asleep.

"Change," she whispered, standing and winding the threads around her fingers tightly, cutting into her hand. "_Change_, damn you, that wasn't how it was supposed to happen––"

She crumpled to her knees, trailing thread across the floor, and closed her eyes.

* * *

_Indis!_

She was running down a dark hallway, chasing a light that receded from her, her breath rasping in and out of her throat. "Wait!"

There was a door at the end of the hallway, sliver light spilling through it and painting the floor the color of Telperion's leaves. She reached the door sill and pitched forward into darkness, falling down and down and down into the rushing wind.

"Where are you?" she cried, the words whipped away from her mouth the instant she spoke, and a soft silver glow appeared in front of her. She cradled the light to her, felt a throbbing warmth under her fingers. This was familiar. This was––

_Indis,_ someone sobbed, and she felt the tears falling fast and thick over her own face, the cry of pain mirrored in her heart.

"I am here," she whispered. "I am _here_, do not weep––"

She woke clutching the sheets, hands twisted into the cold fabric, and the empty space beside her seemed suddenly unbearable, a heavy weight dragging her towards it. She scrambled upright, stumbling towards the window, and sucked in a breath of moonlit air.

The memory of a pained cry echoed just beyond hearing, terribly familiar. She closed her eyes, feeling a hot prickle under her eyelids.

Eternity healed all wounds. (Almost all.)

* * *

Míriel had wondered, once, whether it was possible to accept all things, with time. Had thought that perhaps it was impossible. Yet if this was not acceptance, this numb, cold feeling inside, then she had no other word for it.

There were two left, now, sinking into darkness like a ship foundering in calm waters, despair and fire and the utter end of it all painted on their faces for her threads to seek out.

She turned to Valinor more often, now, and Indis chief among those there. It was easier than seeing the utter ruin of her son's line, and yet something about Valinor seemed wrong, even so––_off_, like a picture woven with threads a few shades off from the true.

Golden light, pooling, stagnating. (All the realms were dead, now, in light and in dark. Was it not always so?)

Sometimes she wondered if she and Indis lived the same lives, in the end, watching the slow decay of everything they had built.

Other times, she knew it to be the truth.

Either way, it would always be Indis' hands she wove, fingers spread in graceful motion, and Indis' smiling lips, and Indis with her eyes closed, hair spread beneath her on her pillow, mouth half-open in sleep. The last was so painfully intimate that Míriel nearly felt ashamed for staring, for running her hand over the soft tapestry and imagining warmth where there was none.

* * *

"They march to war." Arafinwë stood in the doorway. Indis could feel his eyes on her back.

"And I suppose you will lead them?"

"I––yes. The Valar wish it to be so." He paused, and she could hear him shifting uneasily, the fabric of his robe rustling. "Ammë––"

"If you wish me to come, then I might as well let you down now. I am more useful here than across the Sea, no matter how dire the situation." She could see them sparring in the courtyard below, the clash of metal on metal ringing up through the sunlit air. Findis was down there, her firstborn, dancing back from a companion's blows. All her children, going to war, one by one.

"I wanted your blessing to go," Arafinwë blurted out, and she glanced back over her shoulder at him, surprised.

"Why?"

He moved forward until he was much closer, and she remembered the first time he had stood up and she had realized he was taller than her, all of a sudden. "So that you know that I will return again."

_I'm leaving, ammë, and Nolofinwë as well––_and Finwë in the Halls of Mandos, and her son crushed beneath the foot of the same god who had struck down her husband. (And all the rest, fallen.)

She nodded, throat tightening, and when he stepped forward she wrapped her arms around her son, feeling his chin brush her shoulder.

"You have my blessing, Arafinwë." _Please––only come back. That is all I ask._

* * *

"Vairë?"

"Yes, Míriel?"

She held up a tapestry, and the Valië took it, tracing her fingers over the blue fringe, the slate-grey background. The others were long past, tapestries of battles in the sky and piercing light from the west, victory and the downfall of the mighty. Now, something simpler––the end of it all.

"What do you wish to do now, Míriel?"

She slipped from the stool and stood on her own feet, staring up at the Valië with something like a challenge in her eyes. "I am finished."

"Finished?" Vairë didn't look surprised, somehow.

"I am tired again, Vairë." _Tired of weaving disaster and grief and the sorrow the world as for me to see––let this be the last._ She pressed her fingers to the cloth in Vairë's hands, traced the blue of the ocean and the barren shoreline, and heard again an echo of the regretful song she had heard ringing at the very edges of her hearing as she wove before she stepped away. "I do not think that there is anything left to tell of this House, nor anything else to be accomplished by it but that which I may do, leaving here."

Vairë nodded, a small smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. "Your House's story is not done, Míriel."

"Then that story will go on with me as a part of it, for I tire of being the scribe of the deeds of others." She lifted her chin, hands at her side. "Let me go, Vairë."

The Valië smiled. "Then go, Míriel. And I wish you luck." She gestured at the door and it opened with a soft click, and instead of the darkness beyond there was dim light spilling through, scraps of mist carried in on a damp breeze. Míriel inhaled sharply, eyes widening at the touch of air on her skin.

_Was it that easy, the entire time?_

She glanced back once, hand poised on the handle, and Vairë nodded.

The door swung shut behind her.

* * *

Often, it was hard to notice that something was missing until it was gone, until there was a distinct feeling of absence to fill the space that it once occupied.

Indis was alone.

She had not been, before, as much as Finwë had been gone and her sons fled––there had still been something to edge out the silence, to smooth down the sharpness of her grief until there was only a dull sort of ache, tugging at her insides and then, after centuries of sunlight and quiet––nearly nothing.

Something had changed.

She had not felt it before, but she felt the empty space it left behind.

(When the darkness had come––she had never realized how much light there was in the world until it was gone, until the gold and silver light that soaked into every surface had fled. And now, as though a cloud had passed before the sun, as though the light had flickered once more, but she could not remember what it was that was missing.)

"Are you doing well?" her daughter-in-law asked one day, peering into her face with cautious concern, and Indis had found it harder than usual to force a smile and ignore the creeping emptiness that swelled every time someone spoke to her.

Something was wrong.

_Nothing's wrong. Making a fuss about this isn't––you don't need to. It's unnecessary. _

_So don't burden anyone else with foolishness._

For the first time in a long time, she dreamt of the Darkening, of her husband's blood on the steps of a fortress.

For the first time in an even longer time, she dreamt of _before_, of golden light on silver hair and an ache in her heart for something she could not quite name.

_Why did you leave me?_

(Everyone left, in the end.)

* * *

_I'm coming back._

There was a hand in hers, soft and warm, and the quiet brush of hair against her cheek.

It was a dream. She knew that––and did not care enough to want to wake up.

_Did you really think I had left you?_

"Everyone leaves me," she whispered. "It is no large thing, if I am to be alone––"

She wanted, suddenly, something more, to wake up and have someone beside her. To not feel that dreadful emptiness threatening to swallow her.

(And she did not want to wake up, because here she was loved and here there was someone to hold her, and in the morning there was nothing but empty rooms and a faint taste like regret in the air.)

_Oh, Indis,_ someone chuckled, and the voice sounded so painfully familiar. _I will never leave you._

* * *

She woke to the sound of footsteps at dawn, and rose with the distinct feeling that she was still dreaming. The sun-streaked floor was warm against her bare feet as she padded to the window and stood, listening.

The footsteps drew closer, then stopped.

_Arafinwë?_ she thought, and drew the curtain aside, but whoever it was, they were too close to the house for her to see.

There was a knock at the door, soft and insistent.

She flew down the stairs, feet slipping on the smooth wood. Something like excitement filled her, the feeling strange after so long––like light bubbling up from inside, tightening at the base of her throat.

(_I'm coming back._)

Her hand closed around the handle and she paused. Imagined she could hear someone breathing on the other side.

She opened the door.

For an instant, she was a young girl in Finwë's court, watching a silver-haired woman dance through the light, something in her heart _shifting_ as she watched, drawn to the curve of her wrist and the smile on her face. And then she was back in her own doorway, and here was the same smile, under grey eyes that were older than they had been, once––but still beautiful.

"Míriel," she whispered through suddenly numb lips, and felt herself tremble.

She reached out, hesitating, half afraid that Míriel would disappear at the slightest touch, crumble to dust like all the rest––but when their fingers met, Míriel's were soft and warm and undeniably _real_.

And then she remembered––Finwë, and the Darkening, and _your fault, Indis, for driving away the rest, for following your heart (and not)._

"Did they tell you I was coming?" Míriel asked, and Indis still remembered that voice, after so long. Realized something, too, about how that voice echoed deeper in her, like a half-remembered dream after waking––

She shook her head. "You're really here." A foolish thing to say, when Míriel's hand was in hers, but she still wasn't entirely sure that she was not dreaming.

"I am."

Indis swallowed, blinked back a sudden sting in her eyes. "Was––was it you, the whole time, watching over me?"

A flicker of surprise crossed Míriel's face. "You knew?"

Indis stepped closer, and the wind lifted a strand of Míriel's hair, silver glinting in the sun. "I––thank you, Míriel." Another breath, the air suddenly too thin. "If you––you know what happened, you know what happened because of _me_, how––" _When I never _deserved_ it, and all this time––_

Míriel smiled, the movement slow and hesitant, as if she had half-forgotten how to do it. "I never blamed you, Indis."

Indis closed the distance between them with an abrupt movement before she could rethink it, and buried her face in Míriel's shoulder, dragging her close to feel the _reality_ of her, the warmth of her skin and the silk of her hair against Indis' cheek.

"Are you going to leave me again?" Indis whispered, voice breaking.

(_did you really think I had left you?_)

Míriel shook her head. "Never."


End file.
